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Wet-Marsers Win, But Life Unlikely
December 20, 2002
The discovery of evidence for past water on Mars made Science magazine’s Breakthrough of the Year.1 Most recently, the Spirit rover found goethite, an iron oxide that forms most readily in water, announced a JPL press release Dec. 13. Although Richard A. Kerr at Science feels this second discovery on the opposite side of Mars […]
Human-Ape Gap Quadruples
December 20, 2002
Remember that old truism that humans and chimpanzees share 98.5% of their genes? Try 94% instead. That’s a new estimate by Matthew Hahn (Indiana U) and a team who published in a new online journal, PLoS One.1 J.R. Minkel, writing for Scientific American, said “The 6 percent difference is considerably larger than the commonly cited […]
Elaborate Quality Control Governs the
Cells Protein-Folding Factory
December 20, 2002
If it weren’t for quality control in our cells, we’d be dead. That’s the gist of an amazing Insight article in the Dec. 18 issue of Nature.1 “Aberrant proteins are extremely harmful to cells,” the authors begin. How harmful? Here is a short list of diseases that can result from improperly folded proteins or failures […]
Evolution As Assumption
December 20, 2002
51; Reasoning requires premises: axioms or truths taken for granted. Notice the premise of reasoning stated in a recent article on Science Daily: “Because all living organisms inherit their genomes from ancestral genomes, computational biologists at MIT reasoned that they could use modern-day genomes to reconstruct the evolution of ancient microbes.” They used an evolutionary […]
Cooking Up Human Evolution, Or a Crock?
December 20, 2002
51; What’s cooking in human evolution stories? “Cooking is what made us human,” announced zoologist Richard Wrangham on New Scientist. “Cooking food allowed our ancestors to evolve our big brains, the zoologist argues, and created the gender roles still observed by most people.” The reporter apparently did not catch the embedded Lamarckism in that sentence. […]
How Bambi Gave Rise to Moby Dick
December 20, 2002
The title of this entry, in Kipling Just-So Story format, is only slightly modified from an article from The Guardian, titled, “How Bambi evolved into Moby-Dick.” This is not a joke; check on the link and see. The article is about the latest fossil claimed to be ancestral to whales. Hans Thewissen (Northeastern […]
Robot Tadpole Sex Sheds Light on Intelligent Design
November 20, 2002
Scientists studying the evolution of vertebrate physiology at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. have designed swimming robots to demonstrate how evolution might have produced such efficient vertebrate swimmers (see Live Science). Swimming abilities of each robot were tested by measuring its ability to swim toward and follow a light suspended above the surface of a […]
Flight Design Inspires Research
November 20, 2002
There are flying machines hovering over our planet that can turn on a dime, making rapid 90-degree turns. Their instruments process images ten times faster than we can, and possess precision gyros that tell them how fast they are rotating in space – yet their computers are smaller than the head of a pin. They’re […]
Crystals Envision Crusty Earth
November 20, 2002
Reuters reported that “Tiny zircon crystals dug up from ancient Australian deposits appear to have been formed right after the birth of the planet – a finding that suggests that early on, Earth had a cool crust much like today’s that could have harbored life, scientists said on Thursday.” (see MSNBC News). This interpretation comes […]
Evolutionists Reduce Human Ideals to Molecules
November 20, 2002
Two recent stories illustrate the attempt by some evolutionary biologists to reduce complex human behaviors to chance events among molecules. You Are What You Get High On: Michael Balter in ScienceNow asked, “Did endorphins make us more human?” Pondering that question is a photo of a chimp and a naked ape (i.e., man) facing opposite […]
Human Genome Project: A Worthwhile Failure
November 20, 2002
The Human Genome Project (HGP) was filled with promise. Walter Gilbert claimed in 1992 that it would bring about “a change in our philosophical understanding of ourselves… one will be able to pull a CD out of one’s pocket and say, ‘Here’s a human being; it’s me!’” Why does philosopher-biologist Sahotra Sarkar consider that prospect […]
Out-of-Africa Theory Becomes More Convoluted
November 20, 2002
The old simple story that early modern humans migrated out of Africa 40,000 years ago and took over Europe from brutish Neanderthals just got more complicated. A new theory mentioned in National Geographic News now proposes that they took a side trip to India first, 70,000 years ago. After knocking off Heidelberg Man there, they […]
Origin 150th: Time to Mock the Creationists
November 20, 2002
51; With the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s Origin just around the corner (Nov. 24th), Evangelist Ray Comfort and actor Kirk Cameron and volunteers are invading some 50 universities today to hand out free copies of Darwin’s magnum opus. These, however, are spiked with a critical introduction that criticizes evolutionary theory and presents the Christian gospel. […]
Stem Cell Breakthrough
November 20, 2002
Stem cells from skin cells: it’s all over the news – see EurekAlert 1, EurekAlert 2, EurekAlert 3, EurekAlert 4, National Geographic News, BreitBart.com, BBC News 1, BBC News 2, MSNBC and and PhysOrg for sample reports. Two teams working independently, one in Japan and one in America, were able to tinker with just four […]
Intelligent Design Put to Good Scientific Use
November 20, 2002
51; Evolutionists try to portray intelligent design as something outside of science that threatens science. Actually, the techniques of intelligent design are hard at work within science, and have been for some time. Examples are not hard to find on a variety of fronts. Archaeology: “The ability to tell the difference between crystals that formed […]
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